Moneyball (***3/4)

Numbers don’t lie, people say, but that doesn’t mean everyone will believe them. Baseball is no doubt the sport whose traditions are most bound up in statistics—batting average, home runs, RBIs, ERA and so on—but perhaps also the one whose practices are most bound up by the dictates of tradition. Michael Lewis’s 2003 bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, one of the most absorbing works of nonfiction I’ve read, Lewis told the story of how an unconventional general manager, Billy Beane, used the unconventional analysis of people like Bill James to help his team, the Oakland A’s, compete with teams with much larger payrolls. Along with books like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics, Lewis helped popularize the notion of applying economic perspectives to subjects traditionally thought outside the bounds of economics.

Like the book, this adaptation of Lewis’s book focuses on Beane (Brad Pitt), who in 2002 was facing the loss of three key players after a 102-win season in which his team had been beaten in the playoffs by a team (the New York Yankees) with triple the budget. Slightly fictionalizing the timeline, the movie has Beane then recruiting an Ivy League economist (Jonah Hill) who was working for a rival team. Applying the approach of James, who is not portrayed but is mentioned in the film, the two then go about transforming the team. Beane succeeds not so much because he is smarter than the competition, but because he is willing to try something new. Schooled in the principles of “sabremetrics,” the name coined to describe what James and his followers do, they look for players undervalued by other teams, but who can do the one thing valued above all: get on base, which leads to scoring, which leads to winning. The scouts resist like a creationist who think evolution takes away the mystery of life; to a sabremetrician, understanding the genetics of baseball game only makes its endlessly unpredictable outcomes that much more astonishing. They are, as Beane says, “card counters.”

The script, by Steve Zallian (Schindler’s List, Awakenings, American Gangster) and Aaron Sorkin (Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network), does a fine job of explaining the nontraditional approach, although I slightly lost track of Beane’s machinations in one scene where he slyly manipulates three fellow GMs at once. In understandably conveying lots of information, it reminded me of The Social Network. Yet compared to Sorkin’s usual work the pace is as unhurried as the ink-jet printer Beane uses in his modestly furnished office. There’s even a kind of wistfulness about him, or the version played by Pitt. As a character drama, this will appeal even to people who would, as does one character, mispronounce “Giambi,” the last name of a player Beane can’t afford. It’s both a unsentimental reminder that a professional sports player is, fundamentally, a commodity and a classic, true underdog story. Here the underdog is the outspent Beane, who had himself been a player but failed to live up to expectations. Unlike the old-school scouts and even the team manager, who talk about the value of intangibles, he knows that intangibles, unless quantifiable as runs, are a distraction. He purposely keeps his distance from the players, knowing that one day he may need to fire them. Hill, referred to as “Google Boy” by one of the old-school scouts, does a nice job of being the egghead intimidated by the jock, yet sure of his facts.


For baseball geeks, Moneyball the book is a must-read, explaining why, for example, stolen bases are overrated. But this, absorbing in a different way, made me do something the book couldn’t: become, for two hours, an Oakland A’s fan.

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viewed 10/16/11, 4:05 pm at Riverview and reviewed 10/16/11